In wireless communications, single-carrier (SC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) provide two different modulation formats. These formats typically cannot be transmitted from the same wireless station in the same time and frequency band. Conventional wireless standards/systems specify both modulation formats to serve different applications. These two formats somehow must be able to co-exist at the minimum level. Co-existence requirements impose common mode signaling wherein typically SC signals must be transmitted and received by both SC and OFDM wireless stations. However, such an approach for addressing co-existence of more than two modulation formats incurs additional overhead in the wireless network, which in turn reduces the efficiency of the network. This is especially critical to very high data rate applications.